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Saturday, February 26, 2011

Digital Movie Making in and for the Classroom



This is the 21st Century.  Students today are expected to be able to collaborate, problem-solve, and create products.  The world they will enter when they graduate is one in which minimum-wage earners will not thrive and where the ability to correctly answer a multiple-choice question will be irrelevant.  This is the technology age, and children are attached to devices such as iPods, video game consoles, computers, and smartphones as often as they are connected to people.  They will need to be able to manipulate, process, evaluate, use, and produce media throughout their lives. 

The new digital literacies are developing to help prepare today's students for the world of tomorrow.  Where does digital movie-making fit into all of this?  First, today's teachers must understand that a student body of individuals who have been inundated by images, light, and sound since birth will not be receptive to or retain information from the lectures or drill-and-kill teaching methods utilized on us.  Our instruction must be quick-paced, colorful, and exciting or we will be tuned out.  Today's students may actually gain more from a three minute video clip we prepare than from a twenty-minute paper and pencil activity.  Moreover, http://www.p21.org/ lists competencies that today's students will need that can be gained through the planning, design, and production of video within the classroom.  Skills such as collaboration, creativity, innovation, and problem-solving can be learned through real, tangible experiences such as video production. 

Whether or not we are ready to face the truth, reality IS that students are already producing video and other media and sharing it through social media outlets.  If they are to develop the critical judgment skills they will need to survive in a mediacentric world, we must provide them opportunities to learn them.  As teachers, it is our responsibility to teach and hold our students to high ethical and netiquette standards.  How, then, are they to learn  and use these standards if we do not give them opportunities to create and publish in the classroom?  In today's school, it should not be only the students in the broadcasting courses who are using this technology.  It should be all students.

Attached is my latest creation intended to incite interest in the mountain region of North Carolina.  This short video could be utilized in the North Carolina 8th grade social studies classroom.  Students should then be assigned other regions of the state and challeneged to produce their own digital media works designed to inspire tourists to visit other parts of the state.

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